America as Junkshop: The Business Ethic in David Mamet's American Buffalo

America as Junkshop: The Business Ethic in David Mamet's American Buffalo JUNE SCHLUETER AND ELIZABETH FORSYTH He found himself in the window of a pawnshop full of fur coats, diamond rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tackle, mandolins. All these things were the paraphernalia of suffering. A tortured high light twisted on the blade of a gilt knife, a battered horn grunted with pain. I The America of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts is a spiritual wasteland, the suffering of its people chronicled in the doleful letters received by "Miss Lonelyhearts," the newspaper advice columnist. Psychologically exhausted by the pleas of his readers, Miss Lonelyhearts imagines himself gazing at "the paraphernalia of suffering" through a pawnshop window, seeing among its accumulated objects the remnants of America's broken dreams. Some fifty years later, the secondhand shop reappears in David Mamet's American Buffalo, not as pawnshop, from which possessions may be redeemed, but as junkshop. In Mamet's play, the castoff objects of American life, including souvenirs from the "Century of Progress" exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair and a buffalo nickel, form the pile of cultural artifacts thatthe shop's proprietor, Don, peddles asjunk. Within thejunkshop, Mamet's three petty criminals plan the robbery that symbolizes the corrupted, contemporary version ofthe American success myth. As plans for the heist continue, it becomes clear that for Mamet the decadence of the American dream is directly attributable to the dominance of the American business ethic. A central image in American Buffalo, and the object upon which the plot depends, is the buffalo nickel. Having sold the coin to a collector, Don resolves that he will steal the coin back, along with the rest of the man's collection, in order that he may prove himself the superior businessman. Because the collector obviously knew the value of the coin when Don did not, Don feels he has been exploited, treated like a "doorman" rather than a shop proprietor, and David Mamet's American Buffalo 493 he is eager to exact revenge. Thus the buffalo nickel, or money, becomes the object of Don's quest, and the mode of success becomes not hard work but theft. Marnet's choice of the buffalo coin offers a further irony, for the buffalo, which once roamed the American plains in abundance but has declined to near extinction, is reduced to a relief on the back of a coin, its value as a powerful presence in the expansion of the American West and the attainment of the American dream transformed into money. Indeed, money is the object of all business deals and competition for that money the mainstay of the American business world. Mamet, speaking in an interview with Richard Gottlieb, disparaged the ethic that governs that world, maintaining that it allows people to "excuse all sorts ofgreat and small betrayals and ethical compromises."2 He also spoke ofhow he had observed businessmen "muttering vehemently" as they left the Broadway production of American Buffalo, angry not because it was inadequate or pointless, but because "the play was about them."3 Mamet's low-life characters may represent "the refuse of American capitalism,"4 but the playwright cynically suggests that there is no distinction between his petty thieves and more respected "lackeys ofbusiness": "Part of the American myth is that a difference exists, that at a certain point vicious behavior becomes laudable."5 For both the American businessman and Mamet's would-be robbers, competition demands that the rules governing moral behavior be adjusted. Himself an observer of poker players in the back room of a Chicago junkshop, Mamet notes how readily the law becomes "chimerical," rules "anarchistic": "Whenever two people have to do something they make up rules to meet just that situation, rules that will not bind them in future situations."6 In American Buffalo, Don negotiates with Bob, his junkie friend, when he and Teach decide to commit robbery without Bob. Don corrects Bob about the amount of money they agreed upon as compensation for his rejection, insisting, "That's not the deal"; and Bob responds, "We could make it the deal. ... Donny? We could make it the deal. Huh?".7 At another point, Teach...